Title: The Strangest Things
Author: Chrystler
Disclaimer: The following characters are the property of Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, Mutant Enemy Productions, 20th Century Fox, etc., etc. They are used without permission, intent of infringement or expectation of profit.
Summary: "Lately she's been thinking the strangest things..."
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Angel S3 up to and including "Birthday". Pretend "Provider" never happened (whaddya mean, you're way ahead of me?), pretend this did instead. There, that's your timeline…
Spelling: Is British. Because I am. :-P
Author's Notes: See end of fic.
Distribution: If anyone wants it, please ask.
Feedback: Please send to chrystler_wolf@yahoo.co.uk

The Strangest Things – Part 1

Lately she's been thinking the strangest things.

It's not easy manoeuvring a bulky vintage Plymouth into the only free - rather tight - parking space left outside the stores at 1 pm on a sunny afternoon. Pissing off a vampire by denting his precious paintwork isn't the best way to start your week, but that's not what she's thinking. She's thinking the strangest thing. She's thinking about getting old.

In Hollywood if you have the money and the right specialist you don't have to age. She climbs out of the driver's seat and slams the convertible's door closed. Her hand lingers a while on the chrome finish with a mixture of pride and affection. If they have a similar level of attention lavished upon them, cars can be as pristine and shiny as the day they rolled off the production line. Their vampire owners don't visibly age either, not for a good millennium or two anyway.

She dodges past a few people on the sidewalk and ducks inside an open doorway. Most humans - humans on the kind of pay checks Cordelia draws - they get old. In your thirties the furrows begin to set in, and the lines are etched a little deeper with each passing decade, until you're not sure where the wrinkles end and the face begins. Or you die, of course. She wasn't looking forward to either outcome, but now that she's not so sure about a lot of things, she's not so sure about this either.

Her wrist swings her string bag a little as she peruses the aisles of the grocery store. Idly, her hand lights on a juicy, plump, ruby red grapefruit. Equally idly, she wonders if will taste the way she remembers it tasting. Everything else does, she surmises, so why would grapefruit be different? All the same, you don't know until you try. She pops it into her bag. Lately she's been trying a new experiment every day. Just little things. Like a different food, or staying in the shade to see if her tan will still fade, or seeing how many stairs to her apartment she can jump in a bound. So far her results have been both relieving and disappointing. Ultimately, they have been inconclusive. Cordelia finds it frustrating. Frustrating, that she keeps on thinking the strangest things and not drawing a single conclusion.

A few more items are slipped into the bag. The basics like bread and milk. Rich coffee grounds for Angel, Gunn and herself, the imported loose tea Wesley insists upon and a litre of fizzy sugary Mountain Dew for Fred, not forgetting formula and diapers for the little guy. She tucks the latter under her free arm. Sometimes when she's doing the family shop like this, she feels like the Momma bear, the nurturing alpha female, the homemaker, the matriarch. It's so very strange, she muses, that the roles you fall into are rarely the ones you expect.

A red-cheeked toddler rolls like a drunkard round the corner shrieking and laughing with his mother in hot pursuit. Giddy with stolen freedom the small fugitive is proving difficult to ensnare. His mother is flushed herself but with harassment rather than amusement. She pauses briefly to hitch a second infant further up her hip before resuming the chase. Cordelia drops her purchases to the floor and lunges for the escapee, entrapping him gently in her arms. He squirms a little, but giggles into her face as she lowers herself to his level and asks his name. He replies only with a final wriggle before his parent catches up and takes a firm hold of his hand. The mother breathlessly utters her thanks and drags off the now-forever-nameless boy towards the checkout. Cordelia straightens, retrieves her shopping and thinks it's strange that the encounter doesn't make her think of Connor in a few years, but of Doyle - then, Darla.

Since she made her choice she's been feeling an intimacy with the dead Irish man that she never experienced when he was here - alive, whiskey-scented, and gabbling lilting compliments and amusing worldly anecdotes alternately into her ear. She understands him a little better now. Understands why he needed the scotch and the dogs. Why he always preferred the 'run and hide' to the 'stand and fight'. Why it was easier for him to fail at being a human than succeed at being part-demon. She understands now what it's like to look in the mirror and have no idea what it is you see there. Perhaps vampires have it easy, she thinks, to see nothing at all.

She gets now why a man who only wanted to marry his sweetheart and teach third grade would always be haunted by the smooth peaches-and-cream faces of the children he would now never have and the blue spikes of the ones that, to his horror, he just might. Gets now how some ghosts are easier to deal with if you're lost in a blue mist too. Just one more shot, before the silhouettes in your mind blur with the silhouettes in the bar, and your half-life melts into the intangible haze of the half-lives of those with whom you choose to drink.

She doesn't think she'll go that route, but then, she never thought she was the kind of girl who harboured strong maternal feelings until a few days ago: She had been washing Connor's bootees in the basement and found herself leaning against the washer, clutching at her empty belly as rivulets of saltwater coursed down her face, desperately hoping the noise of the machine would drown out her craven sobs, and had grieved until the gulps of thick soapy air choked her throat.

Since then she has reminded herself that Darla was a demon mother and Connor her perfect human child. Reminds herself that sometimes miracles really do happen. Tries to forget she's already the recipient of one such intervention by the deities, without which she wouldn't be walking around a store right now thinking the strangest things. Holds on to the knowledge that Darla had bestowed upon her more than one miracle too and she was so much less deserving than Cordelia, wasn't she? That's all she permits herself to think about Darla just now. Some of the things she thinks lately are stranger than others.

Stings. At first it stings. It stings and you fight. Then there's red. Bright. So bright and thick and velvet. It flows; the smarting fades. Panic suffocates in the throat. Breathe. Breath. No longer necessary. Let it be. Bleed. Surrender. After all, what else have you ever wanted?

She reaches the non-food section, and proceeds to systematically fill her bag with the essential items that are always needed at the Hyperion. Batteries for tazers, pens for Wesley's desk (she swears he eats them), the funny shaped light bulbs that you can't get anywhere else in town but are the only ones that fit in the upstairs wall-fittings (secretly, Cordelia suspects that's because some of the stock in here may be as old as the hotel itself), mousse and gel for the man without the reflection (he's the vainest dead guy she knows, she considers smartly, then recalls that it could be worse and wonders how many times a month Spike has to touch up the peroxide). She picks out a new shampoo for herself (coconut and papaya – one more experiment), and decides to get a second bottle in case Angel does what he has done the last two times she's changed her brand and, after lingering around the back of her head for an afternoon as she works at her desk taking conspicuous sniffs, asks to borrow some. A voice memory comes back to her with surprising clarity and plasters a stupid smile on her face, right there in amongst the bath and shower products.

"Nobody's asking you to go, Cordy. If the vampires need grooming tips, we'll give you a call," says Xander dryly, into her ear.

Xander. If only Xander Harris, of Scooby Gang and ex-boyfriend fame could see her now (if 'boyfriend' was the correct term to describe his role in the disaster that was the relationship/hollow sham/whatever that they briefly shared all those eons ago). She guesses he wouldn't believe his eyes. Well, maybe his eyes, but certainly not his ears if he were told all that had happened in the last three years. Sure, he'd believe all the big demony fights, the dark magic resurrections, and the hell dimensions – he's a graduate of the Hellmouth Program of Education after all. Angel going off the rails - that he would definitely have no trouble swallowing. In fact, a dance of 'I told you so' and the word 'nyah' might be used. But her? Would he believe the changes in her? Cordelia is almost smug as she bets he wouldn't. All those years of high school and still the agents told her she couldn't act.

She's been thinking about Xander a lot lately, one more of the strange things she seems unable to get off her mind. Strange because she can't remember the last time she thought of him and it was more than a fleeting remembrance connected with some more vivid and vital piece of her Sunnydale history. Usually it's an odd snapshot, long believed lost in her conscious, of an encounter with Angel - both the souled and unsouled varieties. Her high school days seem a world away now. So does the shadowy figure, never there but always there, who was a past incarnation of the vampire/man/monster/must-never-forget, who somehow against all odds, and with the very heaviest kind of irony that seems to be a special favourite of the Powers, became the sun around which her life, her self, revolves. Yet lately, she has thought less about Sunnydale Angel and more about Sunnydale Xander; about the only real human love affair she ever had.

The only one she will ever have.

She remembers a thought. She distinctly recalls sitting in front of her large flawless mirror, in her large flawless room, in her large flawless house, and thinking in muted surprise, 'I love Xander'. A tiny, fleeting realization that stilled the air for an instant before she continued brushing out her long flawless hair. She remembers the thought, the moment, but somehow she can't summon up the feeling that prompted it. She thinks it is strange how she can't remember how it felt to believe you were in love. Not in that way. Not in the normal, boy-meets-girl, boy-dates-girl, boy-breaks-girl's-heart way. Strange, perhaps, but also a relief. Because she knows about love now. Knows that Xander never loved her, because she has learned what it is to be loved and has discovered it's not accompanied by the awful nagging knowledge that the supposedly-loving party is constantly looking over their shoulder in desperate panic in case they are missing something better. Someone better.

She knows now how it feels to be loved. She knows, and therefore is glad she can't remember loving Xander. Can't remember how hopeless and hollow her human heart was. Loving Xander Harris happened to another girl from another time. She carries the memories, but only as if she had been a dispassionate observer not a protagonist. Strange, she thinks, but hasn't life in L.A. taught her that 'strange' doesn't necessarily have to preclude 'good'?

Working for an unstable vampire to battle the forces of evil is strange but that's turned out better than she ever imagined. She smiles absently to herself and the shop clerk handling her transaction gives her the same 'are you on drugs?' look of withering disgust that the girl in Cordelia's memories used to give to the man she thought she loved on a frequent basis all those ages ago. She tries to suppress a giggle with only partial success. The girl ringing up her purchases shakes her head to herself, clearly considering this particular customer to be a couple of degrees more touched in the head than most. Cordelia swings her bag of shopping onto her shoulder, pockets her credit card and replies to the girl's aggrieved scowl with a dazzling smile. She's not about to be niggled by the attitude of a dissatisfied shop clerk, she sees a bigger picture these days and knows her part in it. But that doesn't stop her thinking… thinking… strange…

He comes to her, wearing the night. Eyes flecked gold (theirs?). Fingers (hers?) lock tightly into hair. Guiding. Begging. Sharp (his?), they slide. As if through butter. They slide. Slide. Slide. And she slips…

The balmy California sun floods her pupils and bathes her cheeks with its pervasive glow. She pauses on the sidewalk, juggling the load in her arms as she strives to retrieve the keys from her purse. With them finally located she moves towards the Plymouth, dumps her purchases on the back seat and opens the driver's door. The black paint is hot to the touch, absorbed rays radiate through her palm. Pausing briefly to slip on a pair of (replica) Gucci shades, she sinks into the seat. The dark upholstery scolds the backs of her legs. She gives a small yelp, drawing the momentary attention of passers by. Strange, that all they see is a beautiful girl in a beautiful car. Strange, that once it was all she wanted the world to see.

She'll take the groceries to the hotel, but she has to stop off at her apartment first. To jump the steps; sample the grapefruit; wash her hair.

~*~*~*~

Her shoulder bumps the heavy lobby door open, wide enough for her body and the groceries she's carrying to slip through. Her hair is tropically fragrant and still slightly damp, the sweet sharp taste of citrus fruit lingers in the crevices of her mouth, and she bears a small fresh bruise on her right knee. She has discovered that whatever kind of creature she is now it's no nearer to being able to leap six steps at once than her old human self was. She had sat on the flight of stairs, nursed her injury with fingertips and spit, and laughed at herself. Some of things she's been thinking are more plain silly than they are strange.

Wesley looks up at her distractedly from his office as she dumps the heavy bag and diapers on the reception desk. He is poured over a dusty text as usual, looking closer to the age of the manuscript than to his own years. She shoots him a smile.

"Beautiful day, Wes. You should get out for a bit. You could do with some sun. I don't think 'milk bottle' is the in look this season," she jests familiarly.

They have the same conversation every day. It's become a soothing habit. She nags him to get out; he merely smiles his small serious smile and promises maybe tomorrow when he's finished translating this or researching that. She takes comfort in the timeless exchange. It reminds her the earth beneath her feet is still turning.

Shouts carry through the lobby from the garden where Gunn and Fred are playing with a very sun-blocked Connor. Amused, knowing instinctively at whose insistence the babe is so vigorously protected from the UV rays, Cordelia observes them for a while. A big, bulky, intimidating bad-ass from the very worst part of town cradling a tiny form with spun sugar delicacy, while a pretty, bright, a-little-less-retiring-every-day girl teases them both with affectionate laughter. The sight flushes her insides with warmth. And makes her ache in the pit of her stomach.

She turns back to the pale Englishman, "Where's Daddy Deadest? Catching some zees?"

Wes nods in confirmation, chewing absently on the end of his pen. So he does eat them, she thinks triumphantly. She rummages in the bag, throws the batch of newly-bought replacement pens onto the desk under his nose - where they land with a smack - ignores his irate exclamation of 'Cordelia!', and offhandedly informs the room in general that she'll be upstairs replacing light bulbs on the second floor corridor if anyone wants her.

~*~*~*~

It is dark and secluded on the second floor. The voices which carry on the air from below are absorbed by the once rich wall-coverings and the faded carpeted splendour underfoot. The Hyperion drapes its old velveteen and mahogany musk around her frame like a shawl. She moves along the passage in hushed reverence, attending to each light fitting as she goes, letting the silence and dimness caress out the tensions in her shoulders and neck, and smooth away the last vestiges of pain in her damaged knee.

The light above the elevator doors is too high for her to reach. She steals a chair from one of the half-furnished rooms and balances herself carefully, determined not to provide her solitary bruise with siblings. It's still a little too far from her reach. She stretches further cautiously.

"Need a hand with that?"

The bulb is taken from her fingers as another arm steadies her around her waist.

"Thanks," she replies as she leans back into the chest behind her companionably. He completes the chore with ease and lifts her down from her perch with something like a trace of old-fashioned gallantry.

They remain for a moment, slim back to broad chest, in the comfortable peaceful stillness of the dusky corridor. The fleeting golden intimacy, stolen and nectar-sweet, of warriors at rest.

"Give it up, Cordy. You're never going to get between those two. Believe me, I know." Xander again. You knew nothing, Xander, she realises. God, none of us knew a thing.

"Had a good morning?" his voice is low and soft in the gloom. She shifts from him a little distance and turns to face him, resting her weight against the wall behind her.

"Shopping? You betcha," she covers easily.

"Is my…?" he begins.

"Car still in one piece? Yeah."

She affects a pout. He merely grins into the half-light. Face a chiaroscuro. Sparking a thousand non-memories flashing through her brain. A scattered cinematic projection of shapes and shadows.

Scarlet and black. Delicious dark secrets whispered into welcoming veins. Elemental truths - always known; never spoken. She grasps desperately. Grazes. And finally gives beneath him. Drunk and drunken.

She picks up the box of bulbs and proceeds further down the hall to the next fitting. He follows instinctively at her heels like a dog. When she pushes the bulbs into his hands he holds them for her until she has exchanged yet another burnt out filament for a brand new one, then pads after her to the next; all the while hovering at her shoulder, taking the breaths he thinks she doesn't notice.

"Bulb."

"What?"

He has that abstract look on his face. The one he seems to be wearing a lot lately, where his eyes slip to half-mast and he looks as if he's basking in… something.

"Hand me a bulb. This one's shot."

"Oh. Right."

He complies. She turns to reach to the light. He draws another unnecessary intake of air. Her arms drop and, hesitant, she asks slowly, "What do I smell of to you?"

Busted. He answers simply, "Hot streets, and coconut… and something else."

"Papaya."

"That's it. New shampoo?"

She nods, reaches up once more and screws the bulb into its fitting before turning to face him, "Nothing else?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. I thought that maybe I might smell somehow… different… than I used to. That's all. I'm being stupid, I know," she laughs, "It's just… I keep thinking the weirdest things lately…"

Then she catches the clouding in his eyes and trails off. She has an answer at last. And suddenly - strangely - she's not laughing anymore.

~*~*~*~

Business can be as slow as it likes, and somehow the filing never ends and the bills keep demanding to be settled. She moves behind the reception desk sifting paperwork and sipping freshly brewed coffee. Wes has abandoned his eyrie at last, but only to join Gunn in a pissing contest in the middle of lobby, masked ostensibly as an anti-vamp attack training session for Fred. Cordelia catches their woefully transparent exploits from the corner of her eye as she works and shrugs a little in bemused helplessness.

Their demonstrations of parries, punches and spinning kicks get more and more ambitious in their attempts to outdo the other, while Fred gasps politely at the right moments and giggles as she is cajoled into trying moves herself. Cordelia pauses, leaning over the desk counter, and takes in the show.

"The trick is Fred…" begins Wesley, in his best schoolmasterly tone.

"The trick is… never let 'em get in teeth-sinking range of any of your major arteries and you'll probably be okay," finishes Gunn economically.

Instinctively, Cordelia's hand goes to her neck to feel for the scars she knows have now faded to nothing.

"Well, there's a little more to the art of self-defence than that," Wes counters dryly.

Gunn turns to Cordelia for back up. "Hey girl, you've been battling with the blood-suckers as long as I have – am I right, or am I right?"

Before Cordelia can answer, Fred chimes in, "But Cordy doesn't have to worry about that anymore." She turns to Wesley for confirmation, "I mean, vampires don't drink demon blood, right?"

Wesley affirms soberly, "Yes, vampires are unable to feed on demon blood. Only humans are at risk from being drained."

Fred quips ruefully, "Part-demons have all the luck."

An incomprehensible surge of rage rises for just a second somewhere deep inside her and Cordelia visualises backhanding Fred's delicate wholly human face across the room.

She smiles tightly, "Of course they could still snap my neck like a twig, but – 'yay me'."

Gathering her papers, she returns to the filing.

~*~*~*~